facewatch

I am all eyes ....

2007-12-29T05:55:00.000-08:00

Recently, within the last couple of months, and also very recently, within the last couple of weeks, there have been several additions to the world of biometrics-based online face-searching:

Eyealike.com (a clone of Babondo.com)
mydouble.com
facedouble.com

....mmh. Looks like it is getting popular after all !

Dig out the image you want withThe Xcavator

2007-07-19T01:17:00.000-07:00

Ladies and Gentlemen !

This is simply the BEST working visual image searching tool I have seen, and it's online and free ! The Xcavator.net lets you easily browse through stock images by using clever combinations of uploaded or sample images, typed keywords and image tags ! If you follow the instructions of the demo movie you are sure to find the image you want. (It worked for me and the image I got was even royalty free)

Go ahead and Xcavate !

Searching Faces on Exalead and Google

2007-06-23T08:13:00.000-07:00

These two big searchengines are now offering a name based face search. but what does "name based" mean ?

Easy: You type in a name and the search result is a set of images showing faces of persons associated to that name.

Both, Exalead.com and Google.com implement this as part of their image search, although only Exalead has incorporated this officially into their Advanced search options. On Google you have to append "&imgtype=face" to the url of the search result page.

Still, this is not aTRUE face search, since the input is still textual, but it is already a start and it will be interesting to see how the public reacts to this search feature ..... privacy concerns?

The Amazing Facefinder !!!

2007-04-26T07:54:00.000-07:00

I couldn't believe it when I first tested it. Have a look at what thes guys from a swiss research lab are doing with the Google Image search.

you enter a name, i.e. "Bill Clinton", they show you the face !!!! You believe this is trivial ? now think again .... or better, try it out with your own name or that of a friend (preferrably with a friend that is under 35 or is known to have published at least some pictures of himself on the web or even better, a celebrity friend, if you happen to have one :-)

http://www.idiap.ch/googleportrait/

Busy but back !

2007-02-13T01:23:00.000-08:00

Since I have been working on an assignment lately, there was no time to update the blog. but now, just gieve me another afternoon, and I'll see how all these things have developed in the meantime !

re-emerging visual search

2006-11-30T08:44:00.000-08:00

phew .... it's getting hotter and hotter out there. have a look at

like.com

tiltomo.com

and the announcements made by

www.polarrose.com (it looks like it won't be safe anymore to upload your picture to flickr.com, since you can be found by anyone who has a picture of yourself through a visual search, powered by biometric technology. exactly the same thing that is happening at www.babondo.com.While we believe that this type of search has been available in the intelligence community for a while, making it available to the general public is another story !)

Babondo.com - find a face - find your match

2006-11-18T09:41:00.000-08:00

Finally the people that run the worlds safest matchmaking site have translated it into english. The site owners seem to believe that people who are looking for a partner ( or a date) online will have an interest in finding that person through a VISUAL search. This you can do on babondo.com and apparently it works like this: You take a picture of someone that you find attractive, let's say that of your best friends girlfriend. That picture you can then use to find a babondo.com member that looks just like the person in your picture. All the members of the site will be scanned for similarities with the picture that you have provided and will be ranked according to their look-alike-ness. Also, the site provides all the standard functions of a "regular" social networking site such as user profiles, contact lists, chat, messaging, etc. I am curious to see whether this kind of partner search will attract interest... since I always wanted to find a Christina Aguilera look-alike for a date :-))

Mashing up images and text

2006-10-11T11:21:00.000-07:00

Putting together the recent announcement of google's searchmash.com project and the acquisition of Nevenvision, your humble author is coming to the conclusion that the google pace towards image based searching is continuing. While this development cannot exactly be called a "race", I do believe that we will soon see image based searching re-emerge. searchmash.com does take first steps into that direction by returning textlinks and imagelinks on the same page of the searchresult. It also uses some clever AJAX programming to avoid page reloads when browsing to search results further down the list.

Similarities with the rich and famous

2006-10-02T06:59:00.000-07:00

for people who have an interest in discovering if they have a famous lookalike, there is always www.myheritage.com. An interesting website that gives you the opportunity to do a picture search on a database of famous people. While it might be funny to find out if you look like Sammy Davis Jr. or more like Hilary Clinton, this is a "try-once-and-forget" type of biometric application for which I see little potential.

Biometric war on terror

2006-09-07T05:39:00.000-07:00

The development of biometric technologies received a boost through the increased security measures that were both a direct consequence and a byproduct of the global "war on terror". However, the world has yet to see a non-security related application of biometric technology. We are helping to discover those applications and are presenting them here.

2006-09-07T01:12:00.000-07:00

In the realm of search engines that might be offering a visual way of searching the web for images are www.riya.com and, since their recent (18. aug 2006) acquistion of Neven Vision, www.google.com. While riya seems to have headed into that direction for quite some time, google has woken up to the area of visual searching only recently, but since it is able to flex it's financial muscles, they will probably soon catch up.

Thinking back in time, I am remembering the good old pre-Google days, when there were such innovative search engines as altavista.com (now yahoo/overture). And I even remember that there was an attempt to do visual searching on altavista, probably 7 or 8 years ago. Can anyone confirm ?

Worlds SAFEST dating site

2006-09-06T11:33:00.000-07:00

We have recently discovered the worlds SAFEST internet dating site ! You can't cheat or fake your identity since they are using biometrics to compare your photos to that of other users ! isn't this going a bit far ? Also because most of the fun coming from dating sites is related to the fact that you can fake your identity at least a little bit (well, men usually do this, don't we ? to avoid our spouses to find out what we are doing online :-) and of course a fair proportion of the female dating world does it as well) and we are all interested in faking, age, weight & height, marital status ..... should i continue ? better not. So my point is this. The guys claiming to have developed the worlds most secure dating site have actually invented the worlds most boring dating site, because nobody will want to sign up ! (it's not even available in english yet) www.paarzeit.de However, since biometrics and face recognition are becoming normal to people who travel a lot to the US, the idea of using this for a dating site is somehow interesting. Let's see if they come up with an english version soon so that I can check out whether their face search really works ! Thats it for today.

Intro

2006-09-06T06:38:00.000-07:00

We want to dedicate this blog to:

faces (as in "human" faces)
biometrics (as in face recognition)
security (scary,scary)
image based searching
and some other stuff that we have come across during our long and (still) continuing journey through the offline and online world.

So be prepared !

And check back soon.